A half-review of Nabanita Kanangu’s A Map of Ruins

For reasons galore and not limited to mainstream trade publishers’ studied disdain for young poets, in the recent years, poetry publishing in India has become something like an unorganised cottage industry, something like handicraft items, if you must have a comparison. There are poets everywhere; your Facebook timeline is crowded with them. Yet, there are very few you really want to seek out. There are very few published poets and even these books are from little known or obscure presses. There is no availability, and even when there is, in online retail sites, you are not adventurous enough to go and buy a poetry book. So it is special pleasure when you stumble across a poetry book you would come to admire. It is like going to flee market and finding a piece of rare artifact at a throwaway price. Nothing can compensate for it.

This is how I discovered Nabanita Kanangu’s A Map of Ruins. The book was a revelation. I wanted to write about it immediately. Yet, it was more fulfilling to savour her malleable voice than to comment on it. For a debut collection, Nabanita’s voice is measured, timid and almost taciturn, as if she has to force herself to write these lines.

As the title makes it abundantly clear, the book addresses the question of identity, and the idea of home, from the point of view of a third generation immigrant. And instead of wallowing in the tragedy of the lost homeland, the poet attempts to find an identity for herself.

When we talk about immigration and Diaspora in the context of Indian Writing in English, we cannot really avoid mentioning Salman Rushdie and his idea of Imaginary Homelands. Now that we have mentioned him, we will move on to something immediate, to the politics of memory of representation, which is romanticized and real at the same time.

In Nabanita’s case, it begins with this beautiful gem called ‘The Missing Tooth’.

There were reasons for which we had it painfully uprooted
and now the gap of the missing tooth
is an embarrassing memory in the mouth.

But the tongue is a child
habitually searching for a world
where it is not.

This is a fact. We now have a discourse of Partition Literature, which, as it has been nurtured in Delhi, tend of skew towards the North, while the east is largely neglected. When the East is mentioned, the focus is always on the erstwhile privileged class, the landed gentry, and the tenor of the tragedy has just one tune, how they lost their privilege and how they missed it. And again, the narrators of this tragedy are the ones who found their way to Kolkata.

(Recently, I saw a documentary where a son takes his ageing parents to see their ancestral homeland in Bangladesh, from where they had to flee soon after Independence. In is indeed a tragic story, and once back in homeland, which has changed beyond recognition, the couple remember their once-opulent homes, the large fields, the big ponds… I shed a tear or two, and yet, I could not help wonder about the others, the poor farmers who tilled the fields, who tended the ponds. There is a powerful scene towards the end, where the couple looking for the exact location of their houses meets an elderly man in white beard and a skullcap. With a glint in his eyes, he says he remembers the elderly woman’s father. “I was just a boy then, and he was kind to me, gave me sweets,” the bearded man says in proper Sylheti. Then he adds, “Those days, I did not know how to speak Bangla, as we had just arrived from Patna.” The camera then cuts to the ongoing search and the old man is forgotten. I wanted to get inside the screen and talk to the old man. I wanted to ask him if he missed Patna. I wanted to find the tenor of his tragedy.)

This is why Nabanita’s concern for identity within an “alien” culture has particular relevance.